Annual Institute for Astronomy Open House scheduled for April 10

HONOLULU - The annual UH Institute for Astronomy Open House will kick off Astronomy Week on Sunday, April 10, 2005, from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at its Manoa Headquarters located at 2680 Woodlawn Drive.

This festive family event will include activities of interest to all age groups. There will be short lectures on topics such as black holes, killer asteroids, and Einstein, plus hands-on activities such as sunspot viewing, comet-making, and rocket launching.

Astronomers will be on hand all day to answer your questions about the Universe.

The Amateur Telescope Clinic, introduced last year, will return to provide advice about purchasing, assembling and using a telescope.

For the first time, visitors will be able to tour the laboratory where the world's largest digital cameras are being assembled and tested. The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, currently under construction on Haleakala, is the prototype of a four-telescope cluster that will map the entire sky every few days, performing automatic searches for "killer asteroids" and exploding stars. The specially-designed light-sensitive chips used in the cameras on these telescopes are two inches square and contain over 22 million pixels. When completed, each camera will contain 60 of these chips and will produce 2500 gigabytes of data every night.

Visitors can also tour the Infrared Telescope Laboratory, the Adaptive Optics Laboratory, and the Instrument Shop.